Building a new PC? Get a free Optane turbo boost with some MSI motherboards

Tomahawk and Bazooka mobos come with bundled Optane

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MSI has announced a new offer, with selected motherboards now coming with a free Intel Optane Memory module (16GB in size) pre-installed.

Optane modules nestle in an M.2 slot, essentially acting as a cache drive to turbocharge a slower traditional hard disk (thus avoiding the need to pay for a more expensive SSD). And as we saw in our recent testing, Intel’s new technology can hugely speed up loading with some games – Fallout 4 level load times were halved, for example.

Opt Boost, of course, stands for Optane Boost, and MSI notes that the free pre-installed 16GB Optane Memory module represents an added value of $50 (and it costs just under the £50 mark with UK online retailers as well – which is around AU$85).

Room to spare

Both the Tomahawk and Bazooka motherboards come with a pair of M.2 slots, by the way, so you’ve still got one free even with the pre-installed Optane module in place.

The latter mobo also comes with RGB ‘mystic lighting’. What’s mystic about it isn’t clear, but it’s capable of displaying seven different colors and five different LED effects. With the Tomahawk, you get simple red LED lighting.

The final details on availability and pricing for these bundles are yet to be revealed, but hopefully we’ll see these Optane offers in the UK (and elsewhere across the globe) as well as the US.

In other recent motherboard-related news, you may recall that last month, Asus pushed out UEFI BIOS updates to allow compatible mobos to make use of Optane technology.